‘The Woman Upstairs,’ by Claire Messud

Claire Messud’s latest novel, “The Woman Upstairs,” is an incongruous mashup of a very self-consciously literary novel (invoking the likes of Chekhov) and one of those psychological horror films like “Single White Female” or “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” in which someone, ominously, is not who she appears to be.

Ms. Messud’s dazzling 1999 novel, “The Last Life,” showcased her abundant literary gifts: her understanding of the complexities of familial algebra and the intersection of public and private history. Though less organic and emotionally satisfying, her 2006 novel, “The Emperor’s Children,” attested to her ability to write a best seller that moved back and forth between the comic and the tragic, the satirical and the intimately personal.

“The Woman Upstairs” boasts an even splashier, attention-grabbing plot, but it never makes a leap into narrative hyperspace. The reader can never quite shrug off the sense that the novel is a sort of laboratory experiment that hasn’t entirely gelled, an experiment in which an author who writes with Jamesian attention to emotional nuance has tried to inject a tabloidy story line with literary import.

Whereas the tale of a family’s dissolution in “The Last Life” possessed all the visceral complexities and unexpected developments of real life, the story in “The Woman Upstairs” has a schematic quality, as if points on an outline were being methodically ticked off and fleshed out. And while Ms. Messud does an intricate job of mapping her heroine’s inner life, the literary references can sometimes feel horribly heavy-handed: it’s hard to forget that the whiny narrator is a woman named Nora, who just happens to build little dioramas that look like dollhouses. It’s as if these allusions had been lacquered onto the story to compensate for its more sensationalistic and contrived plot twists involving sex, lies and videotape.

Nora, as we quickly learn, is one very angry woman, who, like her namesake in Ibsen’s “Doll’s House,” is in search of an identity for herself. She’s a third-grade teacher who has spent her life being the good girl, the A student, the devoted daughter, the responsible “woman upstairs” — not the madwoman in the attic, she insists. She’s the kind of woman who might be a close relative of Ellison’s Invisible Man or Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. Her mother’s nickname for her was Mouse.

Nora’s mother, who felt suffocated in her suburban marriage, exhorted Nora to go out in the world, get a job and not become dependent on a man: “ ‘Don’t ever get yourself stuck like this,’ she hissed.”

Becoming a teacher was a practical choice, but Nora has dreamed of another life — a life as an artist, as an urban sophisticate, at home in places like Paris and Rome and Madrid, not teaching elementary school in Cambridge, Mass. She won plaudits in high school for coming up with an inventive solution to an art assignment and since then has secretly cherished wild ambitions. Her current project consists of little dollhouselike constructions, depicting rooms inhabited by Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alice Neel and Edie Sedgwick. It’s hard for the reader to tell how trustworthy a narrator Nora is, and things get considerably messier after she meets the Shahid family. The Shahids have moved to Cambridge from Paris for a year, and their son, Reza, is one of Nora’s newest students. Nora promptly falls in love with every member of the family.

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Patricia Wall/The New York Times

She thinks of Reza as the ideal child and fantasizes that he is her son. She comes to think of his mother, Sirena — who is an up-and-coming conceptual artist in Europe — as her idealized self, the artist she might have been if she hadn’t ended up taking care of her ailing mother. And she comes to think of Sirena’s husband, Skandar, a visiting professor at Harvard, as her ideal man, and dreams of having sex with him.

In a direct reference to Chekhov’s story “The Black Monk,” Nora describes the Shahids as her “three Black Monks” who for a brief period reawaken her to the possibilities of life. At 37, just when she thinks her life has prematurely closed, she feels as if a door were opening.

Nora’s relationship with the Shahids, which quickly begins to take on an obsessive coloration, is vaguely reminiscent of the one developed by the narrator of Ms. Messud’s novella “The Hunters” toward a downstairs neighbor. Nora becomes manic and flushed with excitement whenever she is around one of the Shahids, and takes any missed meeting or call as a slight or cause for worry. She begins sharing an art studio with Sirena, who inspires her to get back to work on her own projects. She starts baby-sitting for Reza in the evening, and later allows Skandar to take her on long, meandering walks home in which they talk about politics and philosophy and ethics. Soon she covets not only Sirena’s life — including her husband and her child — but her imagination as well.

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In response to Nora’s infatuation with the Shahid family, her best friend, Didi, gently suggests that she’s “making up stories” in her head, and Ms. Messud uses the question of Nora’s unreliability as a narrator to address many of the same themes she’s explored in her earlier work — namely, the subjectivity of the narratives people tell themselves about their lives, the ways they project their own wishes and fears onto others. We are reminded of how people create mythologies around themselves to explain (or rationalize) why things worked out the way they did, and of how identity is shaped not just by one’s own impulses and dreams, but also by the expectations (whether spurned or embraced) of others.

To what degree is Nora imposing her own fantasies on her account of her interactions with the Shahid family? Is the story we’re reading a vague approximation of reality or a thoroughly warped vision filtered through the prism of Nora’s unstable psyche?

In getting Nora to help out on her big new project — a pretentious-sounding installation based on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” that will make her an art world star — is Sirena using her worshipful friend and stealing her away from her own work? Or has the pushy and envious Nora insinuated herself into Sirena’s project in the hope of enjoying some reflected glory?

Are Sirena and Skandar going through a rough patch in their marriage that could make Skandar genuinely tempted to have an affair with Nora? Or is the couple in cahoots, playing out some more dangerous mental game with Nora? For that matter, are all such scenarios mere figments of Nora’s overheated imagination?

Such questions, like the novel’s copious literary allusions, lend Nora’s story a depth lacking in your everyday psychological thriller. But the dense, self-reflexive writing and the willfully commercial plot combine here to create what is, in the end, an intriguing but ungainly Frankenstein monster of a novel.

THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS

By Claire Messud

253 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

Correction: May 2, 2013

An earlier version of this review misstated the surname of a family of characters in Claire Messud’s novel. They are the Shahid family, not the Shadid family.

A version of this review appears in print on May 3, 2013, on Page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: On the Outside, Looking In. Today's Paper|Subscribe